Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Benchmarked

Although the graphics engine, which was developed in house, still can't quite measure up to the standard set by Frostbite 3 (Battlefield 4) or CryEngine 3 (Crysis 3), Advanced Warfare looks much better than Call of Duty: Ghosts. In addition to the lighting and reflections, the quality of the characters is very decent as well and there are not many first-person shooter games that have textures that are as sharp or faces that look as lively. Although we did discover some flaws upon closer inspection: especially the eyes don't look that realistic, and the facial expressions ought to be a little more, well, human.

Advanced Warfare rates from decent to good in the other areas as well, no matter if it's effects (some explosions and rising smoke just look outdated) or simple physics (not all objects can be destroyed, for example). The environment textures are no different: while many blocks are exceedingly sharp, other objects could do with better details. In addition, a few effects left us with the impression that the developers were trying to make them less resource-intensive.

Despite the shortcomings, the game is decent enough overall - particularly, because Sledgehammer Games managed to give each mission its own distinctive "feel". In addition to the great animations and sound experience, Advanced Warfare also manages to impress with style and colors.

Too bad that the new Call of Duty offspring isn't perfect. It starts with the requirements on the hardware: 6 GB of RAM and a modern DirectX-11 system with 64-bit OS as well as more than 50 GB of hard drive space are needed for the install. Just like with Ghosts there are also a few technical bugs. On our first test system, Advanced Warfare crashed after loading with a very generic error message. The culprit turned out to be the swap file, which has to be managed by the OS and can't be set manually. In our experience, the FPS works better with Nvidia products. AMD-based systems seem to be more prone to crashes and don't perform quite as well (at least at moderate settings).

Speaking of settings: the menu features a plethora of options. Some of the technical jargon might be a bit confusing, but most features are explained well enough to make sense of them. Unfortunately, some of the options impact the gaming experience in a negative way.

Activating the "Cache Shadow Maps", for example, sometimes prevents the correct textures from loading and objects subsequently lack definition. This is also the reason why we don't use this option when we conduct our tests. Selecting "Shader Preload" causes lengthy load times and - depending on the setting chosen - causes the videos to stutter. As far as we can tell, the performance increases is very minimal, if it is noticeable at all. In essence, selecting this setting might actually be counter productive.

Owners with extremely powerful notebooks should be pleased, since they are able to use super-sampling antialiasing. We used the term "extremely powerful" because SSAA requires significant processing power. An example: with a GeForce GTX 980M (see our review of the Gigabyte P35X v3 here), 2x SSA drops the performance by 25 %, while 4x SSA causes frame rate drops of nearly 50 %. Users with less powerful notebooks should use the post-processing options of FXAA or SMAA instead.

As far as the content is concerned, Call of Duty will likely polarize opinions. Gamer X might enjoy the straightforward Hollywood action sequences, while Gamer Y laments the lackluster story line, the silly AI, and the outdated game play (despite the cool Sci-Fi gadgets).